Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash.
Writing inspired by the following SWC prompts:
What is ‘Emotion Number 13’?
Paa Patrickish
by Michaela Fricek
For a long time Paa had feared the 13th emotion of the universe. She did not mind all the other ones: anemonish, bored, sunflowery or even scared – just to name some of them.
Maybe it was just the sound, the number or even the smell she associated with it. Perhaps it was prejudice, but her inner monologue did not stop along with terrifying images. She imagined that someone had abducted her in an ambush, taken her where it was dark, slippery and freezing cold, where it smelled of corpses and she was helplessly at the mercy of a secret power. All the things she had learned in meditation seemed to have gone.
Paa only knew it was 2 o’clock in the morning because her cuckoo clock was chiming twice. She heard a strange sigh that was a mixture of a chicken peeping and someone in a lot of pain. Simultaneously, she could even hear her heart beating extremely loud. “What is happening?” she asked herself quieter than she felt, while she observed the goosebumps on her right hand.
“What you perceive is nothing unusual. It’s a feeling of the inconsistency of spring.”
She heard a strange voice and felt uneasy. She could not really locate where it came from, nor could she see anyone. The only thing she could identify was something outside of her window, which she was sure she had closed. “How can I bring kindness to this situation?” she pondered.
“How about you just accept that you’re feeling patrickish or accept that every spring day is an April Fools’ Day? Isn’t that the day you were born?” the voice that seemed to be in her head said.
“If I were you, I would not tease me that much and invent crazy new words that do not exist at all. I could also say, you should not feel furkanish. I can only laugh with the tip of my nose. The rest of the body is very tense. However, I would appreciate, if you could tickle me pink!”